The Power of Words: Improving Immigrants’ Literacy Skills

Immigrants’ employability and earnings capacity are positively associated with literacy skills. Those highly fluent in English or French are far more likely to find well-paid jobs after arrived in Canada. Higher literacy levels significantly improve employment earnings by facilitating the application of skills, while accelerating immigrants’ labour market integration and enhancing productivity. The measurement of adult literacy skills in the 2012 OECD Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), however, shows the literacy gap between immigrants and nonimmigrants is larger in Canada than in Australia, despite the fact that immigrants in both countries are mostly selected from well-educated candidates. The skills gap between immigrants and non-immigrants exists across all levels of education, including university-educated immigrants, even though higher education should translate into higher skills. This Commentary highlights the role of language and related immigration policies that can contribute to a higher literacy test score for new arrivals to Canada, drawing especially from the Australian experience. Australia’s introduction of language testing in 1999 is a major cause of improvements in the average performance of immigrants in the 2012 PIAAC. Canada’s language-proficiency requirement, despite a refocus in 2010, is not as strict as Australia’s. Given the growing importance of immigration as a source of growth for Canada’s labour force, there is a need to improve Canada’s selection policies, either by giving more weight to language proficiency or by making language testing more rigorous, or a combination thereof. Canada can also benefit from granting permanent residency to more former international students who studied in Canada. As a final point, federal and provincial governments need to make sure new arrivals who have limited language proficiency – especially those admitted under immigration programs other than the skilled-worker streams – receive rigorous language training.